Shark Night 3D's Predators Blow Jaws Out of the Water

When a group of college students celebrates spring break on an island in a salt-water lake in Louisiana, they're met with an unpleasant surprise: The lake is filled with sharks. Animatronics creator Walt Conti tells PM how building two ferocious sharks for Shark Night 3D, out Sept. 2, is "a marriage of art and technology."

Any filmmaker tasked with creating realistic marine predators has to measure up to a larger-than-life specter lurking just beneath the waves: Steven Spielberg's iconic animatronic shark, Jaws. Walt Conti—whose company Edge Innovations has created robot creatures for Free Willy, Deep Blue Sea and now Shark Night 3D, out Sept. 2—is used to hearing the comparisons. But Spielberg's 1970s icon can't compare to the technology behind today's Hollywood predators. "People bring up Jaws all the time," he says. "It's like comparing a Model T to a Ferrari. They both have four wheels and engines, but the animatronics we create today are highly tuned machines. From an engineering standpoint, they're a completely different level of power."

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There are six different types of sharks—including cookie-cutters, makos, and bulls—in Shark Night. While most of them were created using visual effects, director David Ellis knew he wanted animatronics for the two drawn-out attack sequences, in which the actors try to fend off a hammerhead and a great white. "In a lot of the other attacks in the film, the sharks come out of nowhere, grab the character and they're gone," Conti says. "Those tended to be visual effects, because you can choreograph exactly what you want. But the great white and hammerhead were more hand-to-hand. And with animatronics, the big advantage is that if you think of the shark as a character and the actors as characters, then you have all the characters on stage and can direct them at the same time. And sometimes you get these happy accidents—like the animatronic will knock a spear out of an actor's hand, and we'll rewrite the sequence to include that."

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Conti began by looking at hundreds of photos of great whites and hammerheads. To ground the anatomy in reality, Conti's team started with a real set of jaws from each shark. "That way, you can't cheat," he says. Artists made a sculpture of the shark based on the size of the jaw, then created a mold from the sculpture. Conti poured urethane rubber into the mold. When the material dried, it became the sharks' skins, which the team then painted using the photos as a reference.

Next, Conti slit the bellies of the rubber skins so he could insert the internal robotics that power the sharks. He built two different models of shark, a "swimmer" and an "attacker," each of which required very different internal mechanisms. "Sharks are this total contrast of stealthy, cruising lurking and these intense bursts of power," Conti says. "We split those two behaviors into two different types of models, and optimized each to do one of those things best."

The swimming model for the great white is a hulking, 9-foot-long, 600-pound 200-hp robot. "The Swimmer is a self-contained model that swims literally on its own," Conti says. "There's a tiny little tether [that connects it to the power source], but it's all electrically powered with servos." The biggest challenge was making sure the animatronic shark was neutrally buoyant, like a real shark, and was balanced correctly so it hovered in the water as a real shark would. "Everything you're putting inside the shark [that's] heavier than water—the rubber, the motors—wants to make it sink," Conti says. "So you have to make [anything you put into the model] out of incredibly light materials, like aluminum and titanium. It's like an aircraft." Two divers with waterproof joysticks controlled the sharks in real time. "They're customized," Conti says, "but you're basically pushing a joystick around like you would an RC car. [The sharks] are kind of big, expensive toys."

Conti created attack models for both the great white and the hammerhead, which had to be more powerful than the swimmer. "It kills me when mechanical effects are slow, or repetitive," Conti says. "The thing that gives animatronics life is the feeling that these animals are thinking, or doing something intentionally. You're trying to create, through technology, intent and decisiveness and powerful movements." Unlike the swimmer, the attack sharks were hydraulically powered, connected by umbilical cords to 5000-psi cylinders.

The attack sharks were not neutrally buoyant—(the 12-foot-long attack hammerhead weighed 1100 pounds, making this nearly impossible)—so they were either attached by wire to a crane and put in the water, or mounted on rigs that could launch the sharks forward at 30 mph. "We can record and play back movement," Conti says. "We laid a track for the tail, another for head movement, one for the teeth and a bunch of other functions. You record at slower speed, then crank up the speed on the whole performance. You can preprogram things that happen in a split second and totally sell the reality of it being a shark."

The end result: Two fierce predators that truly look like sharks and can be shot that way, too. "That's a big development from Jaws," Conti says. "Back then, there was a left shark and a right shark and specialized pieces. Now, there are no limitations."